Best roller coaster ride, blockbuster movie of recent years.
Nathan Jaco posted up one of these movie ads a couple days ago.
HEREit was and is.
District 9 starts out looking like its going to be Independence Day II. Alien space ship parks a half-mile above Johannesburg.
But then some 1.4 million helpless, dependent aliens get dumped to a miserable grinding slum -- what you see all over the Third World.
What follows is a sci-fi City of God meets Dickens meets canned cat food.
A cowardly, dumbish bureaucrat. Jamaican Nigerian gangsters running gun-based grifts on the aliens. A father-son duo. A wife with issues. A father-in-law of the Cheney persuasion. Shades of Auschwitz, the main line of Apartheid, knocking down slums to achieve political goals. The whole mess of criminalizing poverty.
Wonderful !!
Nate's poll:
Nathan offered this commentary:
The meaning of District 9 can be interpreted as a scathing critique of colonialism. It exposes in a disturbingly palpable way some of the details of how colonialism operates, for example the use of complicated sets of onerous rules and procedures as leverage to gain compliance from a less administratively sophisticated but no less moral group.
In the movie, District 9 is a de facto Bantustan for a displaced alien population. The objective of the Afrikaner overseers is to instill obedience in the aliens through the use of familiar techniques such as asserting property rights to a people with no clear concept of property rights. In a set of circumstances characteristic of imperialism, the aliens find themselves in the position of a disadvantaged group due to the breakdown of their once advanced infrastructure, elegantly symbolized by their broken down mothership. Like most populations which are the target of imperialism, the aliens do possess very valuable resources but do not understand how to capture the value of those resources in the economic system of the imperials and thus do not possess the capacity to advocate for themselves on similar ground. The Afrikaners seek to extract the value of the aliens’ assets—their advanced technology--by gaining control of them. In order to do this they conduct monstrous experiments on aliens and affected humans alike.
Ultimately this is a narrative about how we treat one another. ....
I'm not going to try to improve on that.
The technical side of movie making is well represented. Brilliant book. Solid dialogue -- impressive characterizations all along. CGI is integrated to get plot-connected fx.
Fight scenes will draw back the teenagers for second trips. Its not a kids movie, but there's nothing you won't see in MOR video games.